o Carney Gavin, curator of Harvard University's
Semitic Museum, the bomb that exploded in Harvard's Center for
International Affairs in 1970 was "a moment of light" For although it
was undoubtedly an act of violence, the explosion unearthed one of the
great photographic collections of all time: some 28,000 photographs of
the Middle East in the 19th and early 20th centurie$ including 800
lovely - and historically valuable - photographic prints by a family
of photographers called Bonfils. Acquired by the Harvard Semitic
Museum (HSM) starting about 1892, the photographs had firstbeen
forgotten and then lost.

The bombers - thought to be two young women - apparently wanted to
protest the alleged involvement of Henry Kissinger and his Harvard
think tank, the Center for International Affairs, in plans to
defoliate the jungles of Vietnam. Though Kissinger by then had left
Harvard to become President Nixon's Special Advisor on National
Security, the center, reportedly, was still working with him on
defoliation and was still renting space in the HSM building on
Divinity Avenue, a quiet corner of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A venerable Harvard institution - it was founded in 1889 to provide
"a better knowledge of Semitic history and civilization" - HSM had
fallen on hard times during and after World War II. First commandeered
as a school for U.S. Army chaplains, it was later turned into a
U.S. NavyJapanese language instruction center and then taken over by
Kissinger's group. By the time Dr. Gavin came as assistant to the
curator in 1970, most of the museum's collections - including
cuneiform tablets, Sumerian glass, Palestinian costumes and other
artifacts from digs in Cyprus and North Africa - had been relegated to
basement and attic store rooms or lent to other museums.

But then, on October 14,1970, the bomb exploded and things began to
change. Planted in the center's third-floor library and apparently
timed to go off at midnight so no one would get hurt, the bomb,
according to Dr. Gavin, blew out a skylight, charred a few beams and
scattered plaster all over the fourth-floor attic. Dr. Gavin,
assessing the damage, noticed, for the first time, "hundreds of
crimson boxes, covered in dust and tucked under the roof's eaves". In
the boxes were more than 28,000 photographs, slides and stereoscopic
views - among them 800 golden-hued prints made by the amazing Bonfils
photographers.

For Middle East archeologists, these photographs were to be
important; astonishingly clear and detailed, they handed archeology a
new tool to study Semitic history and civilization - and to an extent
revitalized HSM just as Dr. Gavin came aboard.

Before he accepted the post of assistant to the curator, Carney
Gavin had already worked as a "dirt archeologist" on digs as far
afield as Germany, Austria, Britain and Jordan - some of them
sponsored by HSM. He knew, therefore, the value of HSM's collection
and was delighted to find among the photographs a tin box containing
records of the museum's treasures.

But it was the Bonfils photographs that began to engage the
attention of Dr. Gavin and his staff of dedicated professionals and
volunteers whoburrowed into the crimson boxes found under the attic's
eaves. "The realization of what we had was a gradual one,' Dr. Gavin
said. "I recall bringing Adnan Abou Odeh, Jordarl's Minister of
Information, down to Boston City Hall in January, 1976, for
Arab-American Ethnic Heritage Month -we had lent portraits of people
of the Levant for the exhibit - and as he stood before the images he
began to get excited, saying things like, 'that lace comes from a
village in the foothills near Damascus ' He really began to dig into
each picture".

In Jordan that same year, while Dr. Gavin was attending an
international conference on the restoration of Jerash, something
similar happened. Various experts had presented their carefully
researched findings, Dr. Gavin said, including reports on probes and
soundings and speculations on whether there had been a wall here or
there and whether this find was part of a temple or a colonnade. Then
Dr. Gavin produced photographs of Jerash more than 100 years ago -
when it was still relatively intact- and suddenly all the experts
realized that they had a new and highly effective archeological tool
to use in answering just such questions.

That was just the beginning. As the conference went on, leaders of
the Circassian community of Amman came forward to inspect the
photographs and pointed at a group of men standing in the middle of
the Roman stadium. "See their Astrakhan caps, their Cossack-like
dress? "they said excitedly, "they are the Circassian scouts to Jerash
to see if the water was drinkable".

The Circassians, the leaders explained, had been granted the land
around Jerash by the Ottoman sultan-Jordan was then part of the
Ottoman Empire - as they fled a massacre in Russia. And when their
scouts found that the water was drinkable the Circassians moved there
in 1879.

As this information came pouring out, elicited by the sight of the
photograph, Dr. Gavin and the other experts at the conference saw
that something very important was happening. "We suddenly realized we
were into something that was the other side of history- something not
found in any written report"

It was about then too that Dr. Gavin and his staff began to think
more kindly of the two women suspected of planting the bomb in the
museum building. "They were never caught", he said, "and who could
wish for that today in light of their inadvertent gift? In fact, some
people around here think we ought to put up a little plaque to them".